One of our core principles is to be as open as possible with everything we do here. That includes the nitty gritty economic details. We are running this farm as a business, and we intend to make money (eventually). We understand that the food we produce will likely cost more than factory farm produced supermarket food, but we want to have a really good explanation. To that effect, our plan is to give your quarterly reports on how the business is doing. In our business plan, we projected to break even in 2012 because of all the investment required to get the farm up in running.

Some of those costs actually got spent in 2011, we were spent a little over $4100. I'm not going to break down those costs in the detail I do here, but here are some of the main costs: $1200 for our boar and sow, about $500 for equipment to work food plots (eg. disc harrow), $600 in pasture rent (we currently rent our pasture for $200/month), a couple hundred for seed, garlic, and cranberry vines, about $400 for supplies to build deer fence to protect our food plots, another couple hundred to get our pasture watering system set up, and the rest misc. costs such as fuel, gloves, etc. We didn't take in any revenue in 2011.

Here is a breakdown of the costs for the first three months (Quarter 1) for 2012:

The biggest expense was for the bees, which required a big investment to buy 5 new bee hives. We're hoping that this is a one-time expense and we'll make back the cost over the next several years by including the honey we harvest in your dinner baskets and by selling extra honey. The next largest expense was pig feed. We're buying 1000 lb bulk sacks of feed right now from Wolfkill feed mill in Stanwood. The cost is about $400/ton plus $25 for delivery to Monroe. This adds up quick when individual pigs are eating 5-10 lbs a day. We'd like to find a cheaper feed alternative based on another food handler's waste stream: the most common examples are spent grains from breweries and whey/expired milk from dairies. We haven't been able to find a local source yet, but we're actively looking (please contact us if you have a source or know someone who does!). There are all sorts of interesting things to discuss when thinking about feeding pigs, but I'll leave that post for another day. The next largest cost is pasture rent, which is a fixed monthly cost of $200, which is fairly reasonable but will go up another $50/month in 2013. Most of the Food Plot cost is in seed for this year's growing season, and the other costs are basic overhead and some infrastructure costs such as getting the watering system set up.

As we haven't actually produced any food yet, it's no surprise that we have almost no revenue. The little we have is from deposits for the 4 dinner baskets we've sold and a half pig. Our revenue will basically come in to large bundles: The first when we well the grown pigs in July and the second when we sell our dinner baskets at the end of November. Note that Google takes about $0.75 for every $25 deposit purchased online.

The last thing I'm keeping track of is the hours we spend on the farm. It makes no sense to run a business if you're only making $1/hr. As I said earlier, we're not expecting to make any money this year, so computing my hourly wage for 2012 doesn't make too much sense. My goal for 2013 is to make $15/hr, which I reckon can get me the point of being able to farm full time by 2014. The categories in this graph are mostly there to help me decide which enterprises are the most profitable per unit of time. It's a little misleading because most of my "chores" time is spent bringing food out to the pigs, fixing their water, and moving them to their new pasture. I also feed the rabbits and chickens during the "chores" time, and those animals are not currently part of the for-profit side of the farm. In the future, I might break "chores" into subcategories, but it isn't super easy right now.

So far in 2012, I've spent 160 hours and had a net loss of $3500. We still have a few big expenses in 2012: $800 for turkey poults, a couple hundred to get turkey brooder equipment, a couple hundred to build turkey pasture shelters, and probably a few thousand in pig feed. All in all, counting last year, we'll have spent close to $10,000 before we bring in any real revenue. Luckily, we've been able to pay for that out of our savings and not go into any debt. Debt kills farms, and our plan is to only expand our farm as we can afford it from our own savings.